In her third
trade poetry collection, the last will be stone, too (Ithica, NY: Stockport Flats, 2013), Hudson Valley poet Deborah Poe composes a study of death in four sections: people, place, animal and
ghost. Originally produced as four chapbooks as part of the dusie kollektiv #5,
part of the strength of this collection is in how the multiple voices come
through the text, from one piece of fading text across bold, from a series of
italicized choruses and a poem in binary, or in more subtle ways, wrapped
underneath and across straighter lines. Through composing lines in italics, it
is as though Poe has composed a poem within the poem, commenting on the main
line of the piece and responding to it. Even the preface, the poem “death mix”
(called “tract” in the table of contents), is entirely chorus, written nearly as a kind of foreshadowing,
writing:

stone, wherever you look, stone

in the passages, passages

let the grey animal in

O one, o none o no one, o you

As Poe writes
to open her lengthy “notes” at the end of the collection, “The title of this
collection is based on a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope (Athneum Publishers 1970): Once, resting by the
pile of rocks, [Osip] said, ‘My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too’ (399, emphasis mine).” In a second
collection composed as a “last book,” Poe uses erasure, lyric, ekphrasis, lists
and the prose-poem in a collage of forms, each reaching toward some kind of
unknowing, writing the conflict between comprehension and the impossibility of
what might come, and the foreshadowing of death, the great equalizer. Throughout
the collection, she weaves references to how the ancient Egyptians saw death to
more than a couple of quotes from Nadezhda Mandelstam and other cultural
counterpoints, each exploring death towards an accumulation of lyric on the
subject, presented as a book-length essay-poem. As anyone knows, any book about
death can’t help but be also a book about life, as one can’t exist without the
tension of the other. In the hands of Deborah Poe, the last will be stone, too is a poem tightrope-taut.

le passage

No one asked
if Magritte’s bowler-hatted homme was
autobiographical. This is not a dream; it’s a vision. Past the sign, the
significance. Winter sky. She doesn’t face you because she steadies an end.
Cloth wrapped around her lower half, she hunches. The way forward is
precarious. A body worn thin. She confronts dead sky. Flat panels—space between
ground. Broken earth ocean. You come to nude body. Beauty is convenient. A set
jaw line signals a smile. She’s gone spine. Shadows on twisted stairs rise
behind. She has said all she has to say.
All there is to do now is scream.